Microsoft Academic: a Multidisciplinary Comparison of Citation Counts with Scopus and Mendeley for 29 Journals 1 Introduction
1 Microsoft Academic: A multidisciplinary comparison of citation counts with Scopus and Mendeley for 29 journals1 Mike Thelwall, Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK. Abstract Microsoft Academic is a free citation index that allows large scale data collection. This combination makes it useful for scientometric research. Previous studies have found that its citation counts tend to be slightly larger than those of Scopus but smaller than Google Scholar, with disciplinary variations. This study reports the largest and most systematic analysis so far, of 172,752 articles in 29 large journals chosen from different specialisms. From Scopus citation counts, Microsoft Academic citation counts and Mendeley reader counts for articles published 2007-2017, Microsoft Academic found a slightly more (6%) citations than Scopus overall and especially for the current year (51%). It found fewer citations than Mendeley readers overall (59%), and only 7% as many for the current year. Differences between journals were probably due to field preprint sharing cultures or journal policies rather than broad disciplinary differences. 1 Introduction Microsoft Academic is the replacement for Microsoft Academic Search, generated by Microsoft Asia (Sinha, Shen, Song, Ma, Eide, Hsu, & Wang, 2015). Like Google Scholar, it is a free search engine for academic research and includes a citation index. Unlike Google Scholar (Halevi, Moed, & Bar-Ilan, 2017), it allows automatic data collection via an API (Chen, 2017) and so has the potential to be used for scientometric applications that require large amounts of data, such as calculating field normalised indicators (Thelwall, 2017b; Waltman, van Eck, van Leeuwen, Visser, & van Raan, 2011) (for example, see: Hug et al., 2017) and analyses of large groups of researchers (Science-Metrix, 2015).
[Show full text]